Goodbye, deals - Cheapflights switches to metasearch after 19 years

Cheapflights was one of the pioneers of online travel - arriving on the scene courtesy of an idea from an ex-journalist, no less, in 1996.

John Hatt's strategy was simple and effective. Rather than get into the complex world of payments, customer service and regulatory responsibility for bookings, Cheapflights listed deals from suppliers and intermediaries.

As Expedia and its ilk tackled (and many cracked) the world of online travel agencies, Cheapflights carved out a sizeable niche for itself with the "deals publishing" model.

From its UK base, sites were later launched around the world in markets as far apart as the US, Singapore, South Africa and Australia, under the stewardship of then-CEO David Soskin.

The sites were also supported by a newsletter service, similar to Travelzoo, which curated and sent our regular deals to subscribers.

Fast forward to 2015 and things have changed considerably in the world of travel search, with consumers using metasearch engine such as Skyscanner, Kayak and Wego as portals into comprehensive lists of schedules and fares, rather than looking for specific deals.

Two and a half years on from that and Momondo Group has pretty much completed the transition across the company to now include the strategies of both consumer-facing brands.

This week will see the final transition of the original deals business at Cheapflights switched to a metasearch model.

Hugo Burge, who became CEO of the group in May 2011, tells Tnooz that the move has actually been taking place over the course of the last 12 months ("a delicate roll-out"), with the flagship UK site being turned on to metasearch this week.

"It's an obvious move for us. Metasearch is now very much a proven model and that dynamic way of providing products is something that users trust."

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Both Cheapflights and Momondo are sharing a common back-end platform, Burge says, but the company will retain both brands going forward which will have distinctive and separate consumer-facing interfaces.

The strategy to keep the pair is based on the brand recognition that both retain in various markets, with Scandinavia and many other European countries performing well for Momondo and Cheapflights still a significant player in the English-speaking markets of North America and Australia.

Both brands will also be used in some countries, such as the UK.

All is not lost for the companies advertisers which have worked in the deals model for many numbers, Burge says - Cheapflights will retain advertising units for those individual players and the bedrock of its healthy newsletter service (it has some 14 million subscribers) will feature specific deals.

Burge concedes that part of the reason to move to metasearch is a financial one, with the "business opportunity now enormous".

It is not the "end of an era", he claims, "instead the beginning of a new one".

Interestingly, Burge says the Cheapflights site in the US will retain some of the deals model elements as the business there needs to be "more considered", not least because the CPC strategy works in a different way to many other markets in which the company operates.